Driver Blog Dopeness >>> Jeremy Lowe at Round 2

Round 2 started as we rolled into Atlanta at around 5am Thursday morning. We were running a little behind schedule due to getting my car back together after all the wall taps and Mcquarrie taps at Long Beach. The long dinner at Sonny’s BBQ probably didn’t help either, but it was worth it.

More after the jump!

The car looked sweet, but because we spent all of our off time after Long Beach doing body work we didn’t get a chance to do any of the mechanical improvements that we had planned before Road Atlanta.

I decided to drive Thursday practice, which I’m still wondering if that was a good idea or not. Haha. I think I need to work on staying focused, because it seems like I can learn a track pretty quick, and then the rest of the time feels like a waste. Plus I’m poor, so I don’t have very many things on my car to adjust to try and make improvements.

It didn’t help that the track kept changing throughout practice too. With clips being moved around and cones being added. It was hard to make myself forget what I had just done the previous lap, and then focus on hitting the new line.

She looks pretty good for a Mazda from the ’80s.

Ready to drift.

After the drivers’ meeting on Friday, it was off to the autograph signing where my teammate Pat Goodin and I had way too much fun. Neither of us have hero cards yet, so we were signing Enjuku coupon cards. That lead to just drawing all over the poor model’s picture on the cards. I think my best creation had her steering a pirate ship wearing an eye patch with a parrot on her shoulder.

After the autograph signing we went out for a short practice session which went straight into qualifying. Right before qualifying I noticed the needle on my voltmeter fluctuating. My dad did a couple quick tests and found that my alternator was bad. We dug through our bins of spare parts , but we didn’t have an alternator. By this time, qualifying had already started, so we decided to just run it. We had already changed tires, but didn’t have the chance to scrub them in and start my normal routine of getting into drift mode. I did a burnout on my way toward the starting line, and then radio’d my dad to check tire pressure. I looked over and saw my dad walking away, and realized that we left his radio back at our pit! I revved the engine to get his attention, which wasn’t working, so I started revving it to the limiter, and finally got his attention. Well it turns out that after the alternator debacle, the radio wasn’t the only thing we forgot, we also didn’t have a tire gauge!

So I just ran it, and blew my first qualifying run. When I tried to slow down going into the horseshoe the car just kept sliding and I went off track. For the second run, I just wanted to make it around the track. I compensated for the off-track excursion in the first run, but I guess with properly scrubbed in tires and air pressure, the car slowed down too much and I ran a really shallow line. I put up a score, but it wasn’t good enough to qualify :'(